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  • After the Race:Accelerator and the Cinematic Imagination of Urban Ireland
  • Nicholas Miller (bio)

Slouching toward Innisfree

The one hundredth anniversary of the opening of Dublin's early movie theater, the Cinematograph Volta, founded by James Joyce in 1909, seems an appropriate occasion on which to consider, or reconsider, the relationship between urban Ireland and the history of Irish cinema. The idea for the Volta was put into Joyce's head by his sister, Eva, who thought it strange that Trieste, where Joyce and Nora Barnacle were living at the time, should have several movie theaters while Dublin, a larger city, had none. Joyce loved the movies, but it was his pressing need for cash rather than any devotion to cinematic art that prompted his return to Dublin, where, with four Triestine businessmen as his partners, he opened the Volta on 20 December 1909. From Joyce's standpoint the project was a failure. Having presided over the cinema's opening, he returned to Trieste, leaving the project under the management of his partner, Francesco Novak. Despite positive early notices in the Dublin press, the Volta soon began to lose money and Novak sold it within the year. From the perspective of Irish film history, however, Joyce's abortive venture into the cinema business was a signal moment, insofar as it marks a point at or near the beginning of cinema culture in Ireland.1 [End Page 12]

While Irish cinema has had something of an embattled history over the past one hundred years, the cinema's role as part of the social and economic fabric of Irish cities has grown steadily and significantly in that time. The original Volta, which, in spite of being sold several times, remained in operation into the late 1940s, stood at the beginning of an exponential expansion of movie houses in Irish cities. Kevin Rockett reports that by 1916 there were some 149 theaters showing films in Ireland, a number that had grown to 265 by the end of the silent era in 1930.2 Today Ireland has one of the highest rates of cinema admissions in Europe, and film culture is thriving. Major film festivals are an annual occurrence in Galway, Cork, Dublin, and Belfast, and the opening of the Irish Film Centre (now Irish Film Institute) in Dublin in 1992 has created a major center for film research, education, preservation, and exhibition.3

What is striking is that although film has been and continues to be an important cultural presence in Irish cities, the image of urban space has itself played a decidedly minor role in Irish cinema over the last century. From the beginning, the most prominent films in Irish cinema history tended to emphasize the country's rural identity as primary. From The Lad from Old Ireland (Sidney Olcott, 1910) to Knocknagow (James Sullivan, 1918), Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934), The Dawn (Tom Cooper, 1936), The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952), Ryan's Daughter (David Lean, 1970), The Field (Jim Sheridan, 1990), and The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles, 1994), the image of rural Ireland has persisted as cinema's chief means of contextualizing Irish stories and representing Irish experience in general.4 [End Page 13] Exceptions to this rule of course exist, although in works like The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), Michael Collins (Neil Jordan, 1996), and The General (John Boorman, 1998), for example, urban space figures prominently as a narrative setting without, however, ever becoming the primary focus of the narrative itself. The fact remains that after a century of cinema it is difficult to name a single Irish film that takes the urban as its central object of attention, that treats the city as a primary locus of Ireland's political, social, cultural, and economic self-definition, or that uses film language in new ways to explore and reveal the forms and images of urban Ireland.

Furthermore, in view of the fact that Joyce played such a prominent role in introducing urban Ireland to the movies, it seems somewhat ironic that the cinema should not have proved a more influential tool for the development of the country's urban imagination. After all, it was Joyce who...

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